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Translated by W. D. Howells
WHAT time, | |
| In hours of summer, sad with so much light, | |
| The sun beats ceaselessly upon the fields, | |
| The harvesters, as famine urges them, | |
| Draw hitherward in thousands, and they wear | 5 |
| The look of those that dolorously go | |
| In exile, and already their brown eyes | |
| Are heavy with the poison of the air. | |
| Here never note of amorous bird consoles | |
| Their drooping hearts; here never the gay songs | 10 |
| Of their Abruzzi sound to gladden these | |
| Pathetic bands. But taciturn they toil, | |
| Reaping the harvests for their unknown lords; | |
| And when the weary labor is performed, | |
| Taciturn they retire; and not till then | 15 |
| Their bagpipes crown the joys of the return, | |
| Swelling the heart with their familiar strain. | |
| Alas! not all return, for there is one | |
| That dying in the furrow sits, and seeks | |
| With his last look some faithful kinsman out, | 20 |
| To give his life’s wage, that he carry it | |
| Unto his trembling mother, with the last | |
| Words of her son that comes no more. And dying, | |
| Deserted and alone, far off he hears | |
| His comrades going, with their pipes in time | 25 |
| Joyfully measuring their homeward steps. | |
| And when in after years an orphan comes | |
| To reap the harvest here, and feels his blade | |
| Go quivering through the swaths of falling grain, | |
| He weeps and thinks: haply these heavy stalks | 30 |
| Ripened on his unburied father’s bones. | |
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